The 7 Romantic Virtues: Passion/Sensuality – The Fine Art of Living

Passion is defined as a state of high emotion.  Romanticism is often associated with this state, but this is misleading.  Living a passionate existence is much more that merely being emotional.  The emotion is a by-product of something deeper.

Philosophy looks at the world that is and from there draws conclusions.  Here is where we have advantages beyond our predecessors.  We understand how the world works more now than we did two hundred years ago. 

One area where this applies is in understanding passion.  When in the past people could recognise passion, today we can break it down psychologically, codify it, and lay out a course to promote a passionate life.

In psychology, passion is known as “the flow state”, while in everyday discourse we might say: to be on the ball, in the zone, in the groove, or keeping your head in the game.  Similarly when we say, “Time flies when you’re having fun”; or when you view a film and leave saying, “That didn’t feel like three hours”.  Likewise when you spend an entire day with someone and the day flew by.  All this means that you are completely focused, in the moment, and in a state of high interest.  This is passion.  In the film The Hustler, Fast Eddie describes it like this...

The term flow state was coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi who identified nine factors accompanying an experience of flow.

1.     Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.

2.     Concentrating, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).

3.     A loss of the feeling of self consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.

4.     Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered.

5.     Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behaviour can be adjusted as needed).

6.     Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).

7.     A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.

8.     The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.

9.     People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

To experience passion is to be fully immersed in an activity and feeling an energized focus on the task at hand with full mental and emotional involvement.  It is completely focused motivation representing the peak harnessing of the emotions in performing and learning.  The emotions are not merely contained and channelled but positive, energized, and aligned with reality.  The opposite of passion is to be depressed or anxious in the tasks of living rather than the feelings of joy and involvement.

While experiencing passion the ego ceases to exist.  Ego is the sense of self, but actually it is a false self.  As we mature we develop conceptual representations of reality and we invest emotional energy into these concepts.  Of these myriad concepts the most important is the concept of self.

When you love some thing or some person it is because you have invested emotion and meaning into your idea of it.  Our filters of perception prevent us from truly knowing objective reality.  We only know our idea of it.

Let’s say that you have an emotional investment in a particular performer.  You listen to all the songs, go to the concerts, and buy the T-shirts.  You have strong feelings about this performer even though you do not know them personally.  You are emotionally moved by what he or she has produced and so you have developed an emotional attachment to your idea of them.  This attachment exists between your idea of them and your idea of your self, your ego.

Then one day someone says, “You like them?  They suck.”  How do you feel?  Angry?  Demeaned?  Apathetic?  Hurt?  By attacking what you love they are attacking you personally, whereas if they were to praise the performer you might feel validated or even cool.

This is the ego at work.  In another instance we might love others simply according to how our idea of them pertains to our ego, so if they reject you then you feel lost and hurt when we should be able to let them go and wish them well.

The ego forms conceptual connections to people and things that collectively we see as extensions of “me”.  This is why many Buddhists preach that things are the source of pain and therefore we must divest ourselves of these things in order to be happy.

Values are those things that we act to gain or to keep because they bring value to our lives.  However, sometimes we pursue things that we think will bring value but actually devalue our lives.

Consider two businessmen.  Both want to make money, however one of them loves the process and the money is merely a consequence whereas the other believes that the acquisition of things will make him more valuable.  One man is driven by passion and the other by ego.  The ego driven man is using the wrong tool for the job.  He may acquire things and public acclaim but all that does is inflate the ego.  His sense of self-worth is tied to the things, so when the things become lost or devalued then so does his sense of worth.

The ego produces because the ego is always hungry, like the spider infecting the soul, it always needs more.  More money, more acclaim, more attention, more, more, more.  There is no satiating the ego.  When the ego is temporarily satisfied it is king of the world, but if there is a failure the hungry ego becomes jealous, covetous, hurt, angry, and resentful all wrapped-up in self-loathing.

When in the state of passion the mind and the emotions are completely engaged in reality.  It is not self-conscious, or worrying, or needing validation.  To be in the state of passion is to be in the moment of existence without the ego getting in the way shouting, “What about me, me, me!”

The flip-side of the inflated ego is the deflated ego.  It thwarts passion with the fears of success and the fears of failure.  Rather than being focused on the object of high interest, we are overly concerned with the outcome or how it might affect the ego.  This is another way that ego kills passion like a self-conscious lover.

The ego is the false self.  The true self is the actual self – the self pertaining to action.  This is the self that others see but you do not.  I have only seen glimpses of my self in a mirror, or a photograph, or a film.  I have heard recordings of my voice but never actually had a proper conversation. I have never interacted with my self to see what expressions I get on my face, or seen how I look when I’m walking down the street.  I see my arms, hands, legs, feet, but never the whole picture.

Now, I might look to others to get a better idea of myself, but they have their own filters on reality, so their thoughts concerning me are really just their thoughts, their judgements.  Nor do they see the thoughts and emotions that drive my actions.  So we can never truly know ourselves and we can never really know each other.  All we can know is how we engage reality through our wilful actions.

Often passion is confused with love or sexuality.  This is misleading.  The passionate man is passionate about the world in general outside himself, which can include love and sexuality as well as bridge building and politics.  He is more concerned about what a thing is and engaging it rather than how it might affect his ego.  When he stops to consider his feelings, the ego takes hold and he becomes too self-conscious to experience passion.  The strange thing is, by ignoring the egoic feelings the true feeling of connection emerges.

It may at first glance seem odd that a philosophy rooted in individualism would have a virtue that seems to call for the elimination of what most people would consider to be the self.  That which you call you, that voice in your head that you call your thoughts, even to an extent the feeling these thoughts evoke, are all part of the ego, and ego makes both passion and sensuality impossible.  Many young and aspiring Romantics go wrong when they confuse the ego with the self. 

In terms of the 7 Romantic Virtues, passion is a masculine quality.  Man is the producer, the creator, the builder fully engaged in reality.  He is passionate about what he does.  The feminine compliment to passion is sensuality.

In Rudyard Kipling’s story, The Cat Who Walked by Himself it is the Woman who brings Man into the cave and decorates it.  In the television series, The X Files, Agent Moulder refers to bachelors as “bears with furniture”.  Even now we refer to a Spartan living area as needing “a woman’s touch”.  The feminine has always been seen as a beautifying and civilizing force in society.

Sensuality refers to those things that excite the senses. How does the thing feel, taste, smell, sound, or appear and what emotions do these sensations evoke.  Sensuality, like passion, is also associated with sexuality, but that too is only part of it.  Where passion describes an interaction with reality through either physically or mentally activity, sensuality is an interaction with the thing itself, and as with passion, the ego does not exist, only the experience of the thing.

Of course a woman can feel passion and a man can be sensual.  Both are part of being human.  It is only the general orientation of passion to be masculine and sensuality to be feminine.  If a man is over concerned with matters of the senses, or the creation of sense related things, such as working as an interior or fashion designer, he is usually mistaken for being gay.  I would argue that a man lacking sensuality is a Philistine and the woman lacking passion is a self-obsessed.

The French philosopher Rousseau wrote, "...for the highest reason is only attained through the same power of the soul which gives rise to great passions, and we serve philosophy worthily only with the same ardour that we feel for a mistress.”

Historically, the French have been masters of combining the masculine passion for wisdom and the feminine sensuality.  This is most evident in the institution of the salon where great artists and thinkers would meet at the home of a hostess, usually a courtesan.

The word courtesan has changed meanings a few times over the centuries.  Originally it meant a female courtier and today it means a high class escort.  The meaning applicable here is the courtesan as a well-educated and worldly woman who often worked as a performer or artist.  She was noted for her social and conversational skills, intelligence, common sense, and companionship – not to mention her physical attributes.  What set them apart from other women was their wit and personality.  The most curious aspect of the courtesan was that sex was still part of the job description; however this was but one facet of her services.  She was also expected to be well-dressed and ready to engage in a variety of topics ranging from art to music to politics.

One of my favourite stories involves an emperor who attends a burlesque show, falls in love with one of the dancers and makes her his empress.  During a revolt he tried to flee, but she refused to join him.  Her resilience forces him to act and put down the revolt and thereby save his reign.  The empress Theodora proved herself to be the great woman behind the Byzantine emperor Justinian.

The notion of the courtesan seems to alien to us today.  Imagine hooking up with a sultry sex kitten and then discussing politics with her.  Today we divide the artists from the academics from the sexy, but for the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century French they all blended together in institution of the salon.  In the salon we find those passionate men and sensuous women who define these two Romantic virtues.

In my younger years I was quite passionate, but then everything changed.  In the director’s commentary for the pilot episode of the television series Firefly, there is a point where Sergeant Malcolm Reynolds realises that the Battle of Serenity Valley is lost and with it the war and director Joss Wedon identifies the point where Reynolds lost it.  This is picked-up again in the film Serenity when Reynolds reclaims what he had lost.  What he lost was belief and I know what it is like to lose belief.

Reynolds was an idealist born of a family of ranchers, a real down-home, honest, and salt of the earth kind of guy.  He believed in his cause and he believed in his God.  When he lost it was as if the sun had risen in the west.  His whole worldview turned up-side-down.  Now all he cared about was surviving by any means necessary, though occasionally the old moral sensibilities would kick-in.  It is not until the event of the film Serenity that he regains his believe and therefore his passion for life.

As Shepherd Book told Mal, “I don't care what you believe in, just believe in it”.  It is belief that drives the emotions that fuel the passionate existence.  It really does not matter what you believe in.  Just believe, though I would advise that your belief system is rooted in Truth.

As for me, well I struggle with living passionately.  Its difficult when you’ve lost faith, but like Captain Reynolds I’m recovering.

To be passionate is to be in a state of high interest, curiosity, and driven by the need to discover, create, and experience the world outside the subjective bubble.  This whole-hearted involvement with reality, either through passion or sensuality, has always been the hallmark of the Romantic reflecting the values of love and beauty in every day life.  Nothing could be more beneficial for the Romantic than to cultivate a passionate existence for in that lays the true art of living.